Words, words, words – again

 I know you only come here to find solutions to all your writing problems or learn how to conduct yourself in polite society or maybe find out the latest on chaffinch migrations, but this time I’ll just be waffling on about some recent events – totally separate and yet linked by a specific theme.

I should first establish that I have that feeling of well-being you get when you open a package and find yourself holding a copy of your latest book. In this case, it’s not technically the latest because The Figurehead has been available for a year now, but this is the new Pfoxchase edition – you know, the one with the cover I’ve been raving about for a while – and it’s even more gorgeous in the flesh than it seems in the picture. I know ebooks are the future (and the present, too), but they’ll never be able to replicate the physical feeling of opening the pages, seeing your words there, feeling the weight of the object in your hand and, well, just looking at the actual evidence that you’ve written it.

Anyway, let’s get to the theme I mentioned. Because the books aren’t yet being printed in the UK, they came in a package from the USA and one scary aspect of them was that one of the labels was clearly marked, in big letters, LANGLEY, which is where the CIA holds its garden parties and other events. A second label showed that the books had first gone to Frankfurt and a third carried just one word – OVERWEIGHT. So there they were, three seemingly innocent scraps of paper which illustrated perfectly the power of words – isolated words, words not strung together by an individual to create an effect or convey any particular meaning – just labels. But the first two – Langley and Frankfurt – made me wonder why I was under surveillance not only in America but also in Germany, and the final one was clearly a gratuitous personal insult.

So that’s one of the events. The next concerns a conference I went to this week, down in Edinburgh. By the way, if you haven’t been there yet, try to get there some time. Glasgow has a dynamism and energy that’s terrific, and its architecture is impressive, but Edinburgh, with its castle rearing up across the gardens from Princes Street and its Georgian elegance is like a beautifully realised film set. (Which is a pretty strange simile to use since film is artificial and Edinburgh is emphatically real. Maybe that just shows how our exposure to media conditions our perceptions – to really believe in something we have to have seen it on TV or at the cinema.) Anyway, I was there to do a wee role-play as part of a presentation given by a friend of mine who’s a leading authority on rheumatology and he wanted someone to pretend to be a patient being interviewed by a nurse about taking part in clinical trials. And that was me.

But the reason I bother to mention it is that, on the first slide of his presentation, he identified the people taking part and there, at the bottom, were the words ‘Bill Kirton, Patient Actor’. And I wonder whether you’ve just had the reaction I did when I read that. It made me start speculating about all the other types of actor he could have had – impatient, stoical, gay, bloody furious – well, you can add plenty of your own adjectives. And it’s yet another example of the magical, independent power of words in isolation, and the other power – that which they give to those who can use them effectively. The slide was simply identifying me as an actor playing a patient, and yet the simple juxtaposition of words created a totally different phenomenon; it implied a specific personality type, suggested a whole story behind why I was there, how I’d reacted to the request to play the role. It might even have been a comment on my entire acting career. In fact, it could easily have set the audience speculating about why it was necessary to stress that I was patient rather than grumpy or insecure. And my friend might have been doling out his wisdom and expertise to a room full of people who were more interested in solving the mystery of this enigmatically patient actor.

And one final word-related story. On the train to and from Edinburgh I finished reading My Demon by Lisa Hinsley, which is a very readable, scary book. I decided to review it for Booksquawk and today scribbled some notes about it and, since one of its themes is the connection between lust and violence (even death), a word came into my head that I hadn’t used or even remembered since my days as a university lecturer. I didn’t use it much then, admittedly, but it cropped up now and again in articles on the Romantics or writers conveying decadence. It’s a small, undistinguished word but it carries all sorts of echoes, implications, concepts and contradictions, and it illustrates the chasms that can open under just a single word. It’s algolagnia. Try it.

Words, eh?

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